I was
very greatly impressed by Garrett. Had I known before that it is he who
writes under the pseudonym of Matt Low in the Adelphi and one or two
other places, I would have taken steps to meet him earlier. He is a biggish
hefty chap of about 36, Liverpool-Irish, brought up a Catholic but now a
Communist. He says he has had about nine month's work in (I think) the last
6 years. He went to sea as a lad and was at sea about 10 years, then worked
as a docker. During the war he was torpedoed on a ship that sank in 7
minutes, but they had expected to be torpedoed and had got their boats
ready, and were all saved except the wireless conductor, who refused to
leave his post until he had got an answer. He also worked in an illicit
brewery in Chicago during prohibition, saw various hold-ups, saw Battling
Siki immediately after he had been shot in a street brawl, etc. etc. All
this however interests him much less than Communist politics. I urged him to
write his autobiography, but, as usual, living in about two rooms on the
dole with a wife (who, I gather, objects to his writing) and a number of
kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do
short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool it is
almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere
as a Communist.(l)

The words
above are George Orwell's, who met with George Garrett on February the 25th 1936
while visiting Liverpool as part of his research for The Road to Wigan Pier.
Garrett's name is all but unknown in literary circles today, but when his
writing first appeared in the thirties it regularly received high praise from
established literary figures such as Orwell. Sylvia Townsend Warner, John
Lehmann and Tom Harrison were also "very greatly impressed" by the Merseyside
left-wing writer and activist. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin with
Orwell's account of their meeting, partly because its detailed description of
Garrett is a useful place to start for those who have not heard of him before
now, and also because it contains a number of details about Garrett's travels to
America which are the subject of this paper.

There are a
number of reasons why Garrett became a forgotten name in 1930s English
literature. One is that the body of work he left behind is relatively small. As
Orwell notes, Garrett could not escape the demands of finding work and
supporting a large family (he had seven sons), and ultimately these factors kept
him from producing any writing on a large scale. Just ten short stories, two
pieces of reportage and a handful of articles were published in his lifetime,
although since his death in 1966 some other unreleased works have been
discovered. Garrett's popularity as a writer was also compromised by tensions
arising following the end of World War Two and the beginning of the Cold War.
Growing paranoia surrounding the perceived threat posed by Communist Russia led
to a sharp decline in the success of western proletarian writers such as
Garrett, who had voiced their support of left-wing politics during the thirties.
This fall from grace affected many of Garrett's contemporaries too, and such
1930s working class authors as James Hanley, Jack Hilton, Jim Phelan and Jack
Common are still neglected and under-researched figures in most current studies
of British writing from between the wars.

However, the study of Garrett's work is rewarding for it reveals much about
leftwing politics, labour history on Merseyside, the stylistics of resistance
writing, and tactics for overcoming the implicit class domination that lies
within conventional literary forms. Furthermore, and most significantly,
Garrett's work also contains fascinating details concerning the interplay
between British and American left-wing organisations during the 1920s and 30s.
This was an immensely lively time for socialist movements on both sides of the
Atlantic, and I'd like to look in particular at the various ways in which
Garrett's life and writing were influenced by one of the most famous of all
American labour movements: The Industrial Workers of the World.

The IWW was
founded in 1905 and still exists in various forms today. Key Wobblies (as its
members were nicknamed) who played an active role in beginning the organisation
were Daniel de Leon, Eugene V. Debs, Lucy and Albert Parsons and "Big" Bill
Haywood, a former cowboy who had already experienced militant industrial action
as part of the Western Federation of Miners.(2) Philip Sheldon Foner writes that
the Wobblies' primary goal was to establish "one big union," which would bring
together all workers, "regardless of skill, sex, colour or nationality. "(3)
This union would operate through a series of strikes and passive demonstrations,
which were to culminate in the abolition of the capitalist wage system and
introduce a new order in which the workers would run industries themselves.(4)

The
idea of a union free of all boundaries and distinctions was a bold one, given
that racial and social prejudice in America had hindered previous attempts to
create similar collectives. However, the Wobblies quickly generated a huge
following among poorly paid workers who suffered under the wage system,
particularly those from other countries who were either unemployed or being
exploited in menial jobs. Indeed, much of the Wobblies' early success as a
political movement may be due to the fact that they welcomed people of all races
and nationalities at a time when America was deluged with migrant workers from
all across Europe and the world. Furthermore, the IWW's principles of equality
could not have been more appealing to George Garrett. Perhaps the principal
reason why Garrett was so well-suited to the Wobblies' politics was that he was
a lifetime advocate of tolerance and acceptance, sometimes displaying attitudes
that were considerably ahead of his time. Take, for example, the following
segment from a speech made by Garrett at a Liverpool unemployment demonstration
in 1921:

Fellow
workers, it is all very well criticising the alien as one of your speakers has
been doing, and telling you that he is the cause of your unemployment. It is not
so. The present rotten system is the cause... All workers are slaves to the
capitalists no matter what their race, colour or creed is, and there is more
slavery under British Imperialism and the Union Jack than under any other flag.
You Britishers, you sometimes give me a pain. I don't tell people I'm a
Britisher. I had no choice in being where I was where I was born. How many of
you have the guts of the Indians who are following Ghandi in India today, or
following Michael Collins in Ireland? There people are only trying what we
should be doing, breaking the bonds of their serfdom. (5)

Garrett joined the Wobblies around the year 1918, on a trip to the United States
taken shortly after the end of World War One. (This was not his first visit to
America: in 1913 he stowed away on a tramp steamer bound for Buenos Aires and
spent several years travelling "hobo-style" in South America, and after
returning to sea as a ship's stoker made several other working visits to the
States.) The IWW achieved its widest popularity and highest membership figures
in the years leading up to 1914. By 1918 the movement was already a shadow of
its former self, having suffered ruthless suppression and numerous witch-hunts
during the war years. More about this later; for the moment, suffice to say that
by the time Garrett joined the Wobblies, their glory days were over.
Furthermore, the IWW member who had the greatest individual influence on
Garrett's works was already dead. This was the most famous and best remembered
Wobbly of all: songwriter and lyricist Joe Hill.

Born
Joel Emmanuel Hagglund in 1879, he changed his name first to Joseph Hillstrom
and then to Joe Hill after moving to America from his native Sweden in 1902. (6)
In 1910 he joined the Wobblies, after working for seven years in a variety of
menial jobs, and also experiencing periods of unemployment and vagrancy as
Garrett and countless other immigrants to the United States had done.(7) During
his time as a member of the IWW Joe Hill produced some of America's most famous
protest songs, including 'Casey Jones the Union Scab', There is Power in a
Union', We Will Sing One Song' and The Rebel Girl' (dedicated to Elizabeth
Gurley Flynn, an IWW member with whom Hill had a light romantic attachment, and
also with a nod to a ten-year-old named Katie Phar who wrote to Hill while he
was in prison). Even those who have not heard of Joe Hill today will probably
have used, at least a few times, a phrase that he coined. It may surprise some
to learn that the expression "pie in the sky," now in common usage, was invented
by Hill for his song The Preacher and the Slave', and originally meant a
hollow, palpable promise intended to keep the masses content but which provided
no material comfort in the real world. It is surely best expressed in the first
verse and chorus of the song in which it originally appeared:

Long-haired
preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right,
But when asked about something to eat, They will answer with voices so sweet:

CHORUSYou will eat (you will eat) by and by,In that glorious land in the sky (way up high).Work and pray, live on hay,You'll get pie in the sky when you die (that's a lie).(8)

Joe
Hill was arrested on the 13th of January 1914, for the murder of ex-police
officer John Morrison and his seventeen-year-old son Alving.(9) Whether Hill
actually committed the crime, or whether the arrest was a frame-up intended to
eliminate a man who was by that time viewed by many as a dangerous radical and
rebel-rouser, has been the subject of much spirited debate in the decades since.
His trial was a lengthy and extremely involved affair (Patrick Renshaw remarks
that only the Sacco and Vanzetti affair of the 1920s has rivalled it for sheer
complexity), but the final verdict was guilty and Hill was executed by firing
squad on November the 18th 1915.(10) His last words, wired to IWW leader "Big"
Bill Haywood, were: "Don't waste time in mourning. Organise""

Although George Garrett never met Joe Hill, we know that he was a great fan of
his works and owned at least one edition of Songs of the Workers, or
The Little Red Songbook. This text, first released around 1912 and updated
and reissued periodically, published songs by Joe Hill and other IWW activists
with the intention of "fanning the flames of discontent." Garrett was forced to
leave the IWW and America in 1920 after a crackdown on illegal immigrants by the
US authorities, and soon afterwards he began producing protest songs himself in
Liverpool, taking his cue from Hill and the other Wobbly lyricists he had
encountered.

Michael Murphy, in his introduction to The Collected George Garrett
(Trent Editions, 1999), suggests a link between Garrett's lyrical works and the
songs of Joe Hill. I would like to make this link clear by examining the two
surviving musical numbers by Garrett, 'Marching On!' and 'Seamen
Awake.' The former was one of Garrett's first published works, and was sold
as a broadsheet to raise funds for the Liverpool contingent of the 1922 National
March on London. This was the first of six such marches that took place between
that year and 1936, and Garrett, along with a Boer War veteran friend named
McMahon, organised the marchers from the Merseyside region. 'Marching On!'
is set to the tune of English Transport Workers' Strike Song 'Hold the Fort',
and the segments from both songs reproduced below illustrate the identical
rhythm and metre: Page 4

Too long
we've starved in silence grimAnd watched the parasite Waste in luxury the wealthProduced by Labour's might

The practice
among political radicals of setting new words to existing tunes was commonplace
long before Garrett, Joe Hill or the Wobblies, and dates back to at least the
eighteenth century. (15). Hill and the other IWW songwriters were contributing
to an existing tradition by reworking hymns and popular music, and turning their
lyrics into parodies of the original words. Garrett's protest songs are part of
this tradition too, and also demonstrate an awareness of popular common themes
in their lyrics. If we compare 'Marching On!’ with Hill's 'Workers of the World
Awaken!’, the similarities are striking:

Too long we've starved in silence grimAnd watched the parasiteWaste in luxury the wealthProduced by Labour's might

'Workers of
the World Awaken!' verse 1

Workers of
the world awaken! Break your chains, demand your rightsAll the wealth you make is taken
By exploiting parasites.

Shall you
kneel in deep submissionFrom your cradles to your graves Is the height of your ambition
To be good and willing slaves ?

Similarly, parts of Garrett's song 'Seamen Awake', which was probably written
around the same time as 'Marching On!', recall quite strongly Hill's There is
Power in a Union.' The common ground here is Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem 'The
Mask of Anarchy’, written in 1819 and published 1832. This poem, which calls
upon the revolutionary language emerging from France at the time, was hugely
popular among radicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for its
exhortations to the working class to rise up against the capitalist system that
exploited them. Many motifs popular in twenties and thirties protest songs, such
as the breaking of chains, the right to be more than a simple wage-slave and the
plutocrat wasting his wealth in comfort, first appeared in this piece and have
been seized upon by countless proletarian songwriters since. Among the most
influential stanzas are the following:

Rise like
lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to Earth like dew,Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many-they are few- [..]

Tis to work
and have such pay As just keeps life from day to day In your limbs, as in a cell,
For the tyrants' use to dwell...

Tis to hunger
for such diet As the rich man in his riot Casts to the fat dogs that lie
Surfeiting beneath his eye.. (16)

Shelley's popularity among working class socialists and radicals was so great
that Joe Hill and Garrett would both have heard of him, and been influenced by
his works. We can see from this that Garrett's songs, while most immediately
inspired by Joe Hill and the other IWW lyricists he would have come across in
his Little Red Songbook, were also a part of radical and popular
traditions that both he and Hill can be said to belong to. But it's not just in
his protest songs that Garrett's experiences with the Wobblies emerge and are
made use of. His more serious works of literature, in particular one piece of
reportage, tie Garrett's life, politics and writing most closely to the
Industrial Workers of the World.

'Liverpool 1921-1922', Garrett's longest surviving work and the last one
published in his lifetime, recalls classic IWW writing in two ways. Firstly, its
author uses the established Wobbly technique of writing about real people but
not naming them, representing them instead by certain social types. Garrett
himself features as a character in two different guises, "The Young Seaman"
and "The Syndicalist," and many important figures from 1920s left-wing
Liverpool appear under such aliases as 'The Old Police Striker" and "The
Spiritualist." Indeed, "The Man in the Stetson" and 'The Woman
Organiser" are Jack Braddock and Mary "Ma" Bamber, husband and mother
respectively of Garrett's close friend, Bessie Braddock M.P..

'Liverpool 1921 -1922' is also reminiscent of Wobbly writing in that it
deals with many of the same issues, problems and ambiguities that the IWW had
themselves faced, and which Garrett had encountered during his time with them.
By 1921 Garrett was back on Merseyside, still unemployed, and an active member
of Robert Tisseyman's Liverpool's branch of the National Unemployed Worker's
Movement. This organisation was founded by Wal Hannington in 1921, and was in
many ways very similar to the Wobblies in that it set out to be a nationwide
union and was founded on principles of non-violent protest, tolerance and
passive demonstration. Its goal, to provide the British proletariat with "Work
or Full Maintenance," recalls the Wobblies' quest to better the lives of the
poorly-treated working class.(17) The NUWM was also similar to the IWW in that
it faced many of the same types of opposition, from the government and local
authorities.

After
America's entry into World War One in 1917, many Wobblies were arrested and
jailed on charges of encouraging anti-war attitudes, of resisting American
involvement in the conflict, and of sabotage and other subversive acts.(18 ) It
was also put about that the movement was in receipt of gold from the Kaiser in
order to carry out its misdeeds, which led Senator Henry F. Ashurst to suggest
that the letters IWW stood for "Imperial Wilhelm's Warriors. "(19) Garrett
writes in 'Liverpool 1921-1922' that the NUWM faced exactly these types
of unfounded prejudice and institutionalised suppression in the early twenties.
Such matters are seen most vividly in the segment of that deals with the
so-called "Storming of the Walker Art Gallery" on the 12th of September
1921. On that day, Garrett and several hundred other members of the Merseyside
NUWM were batoned down by troops during a nonviolent protest at Liverpool's
Walker Art Gallery (the speech by Garrett quoted earlier was made at that
demonstration), and many were arrested, tried and accused of receiving funds
from Communist Russia. There's a striking similarity between this chapter in the
NUWM's history and the ordeal of the Wobblies in wartime America, and in drawing
this parallel Garrett becomes able to engage with many key IWW debates in
'Liverpool 1921-1922.' At the forefront of these is the issue of non-violent
protest and whether it has any value in a world where the struggle for
working-class rights seems to be ruthlessly crushed time and time again by
uncaring authority. This debate was eternally troubling for Garrett and the IWW,
and sadly it is not easily resolved.

There's not enough space to go into 'Liverpool 1921-1922' in the detail
it deserves here, but I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in the
writings of the IWW, or wants to see the ways in which creative interaction
occurred between Wobblies in Britain and the United States. Bob Holton writes
that this trans-Atlantic interplay was at its liveliest in the 1920s, and took
place mostly in Garrett's native Liverpool. Merseyside had its own English
branch of the IWW, set up by Jack Braddock during the War, which provided a
refuge for American Wobblies fleeing persecution at home and also sent funds to
help members facing trial in the States (via local seamen sympathetic to the
cause, and surely Garrett was among them).(21) Out of this arose the creative
impact that IWW politics made upon much British working class literature.

To
find the British writer who best exemplifies this influence from the USA, look
no further than George Garrett. Though he belonged to many different left-wing
movements in his colourful life, including among others the NUWM, the Seamen's
Vigilance Committee and the Unity Theatre Network, his political self was
perhaps shaped most of all by the first radical movement he ever encountered:
The Industrial Workers of the World. Garrett's loyalty to the Wobblies is
evident in his protest songs, in works such as 'Liverpool 1921-1922,' and
also in his remarkable drama Flowers and Candles, written in New York in
1925 and sadly unpublished and unperformed to this day. What's fascinating about
Flowers is that Garrett produced an English version of the play as well
as an American one, keeping the same essential story but changing certain
details of dialect and character origins to provide appropriate local flavour.
("Candies" becomes "chocolates," "Mom" becomes "Mam," Manuel, a Pilipino
immigrant worker, becomes Charlie, an Afro-Caribbean, and so on.) Flowers and
Candles is perhaps the best example of the personal politics that made
Garrett an exemplary IWW member, and why he commanded the respect and admiration
of those who knew him. He saw people as essentially the same, superficially
diverse but motivated by common needs and plagued by similar problems. He
believed that the world's workers could rise up in one big union, and put their
differences aside for the mutual goal of bettering the lot of the poor and
underprivileged. This was the goal that motivated his existence, and also gave
life to his writing.

2 Philip
Sheldon Foner, The Case of Joe Hill, New York: New World Paperbacks,
1965, pp.9-10.

3 Foner, p.
10.

4 Foner, p.
10.

5 The speech
was made on the 12th of September 1921, and Garrett's words were noted by one of
the CID Special Branch members monitoring the demonstration at the time. Michael
Murphy, in his introduction to The Collected George Garrett (Nottingham:
Trent Editions, 1999, p. xxv) reproduces Garrett's words in full.

20 Garrett
was among the NUWM workers brought to trial after the debacle, and was accused
by the prosecuting lawyer of receiving gold from a government body. Garrett
immediately pleaded guilty to this. The lawyer, astonished by his willing
confession, asked him to tell him which government was funding him. Garrett
replied: 'The British Government. I'm on the dole." (Garrett, 'Liverpool
1921-1922', in Garrett 1999, p.211.)